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May 7, 2012 -- 1:00PM, Ocule wrote:

You cant use a ritual like that unless your DM is horrible. No sane DM will allow the use of ritual exploitation to explode bombs.

I disagree strongly with the bolded. Imagine that you, as a DM, have laid out a siege scenario. Now a player comes up and says "well I use this spell in this way to break the castle walls so our army can swarm in". If you say no to that perfectly reasonable plan, even though it is an exploit of a flaw in the gaming system, you will encounter resentment by your players, especially if the siege scenario is tough. Why didn't it work? Spell A is Spell A after all...

This kind of thing is what I want the game system to esplicitly avoid. Some people like it; they say it is a creative way to use a spell and should be rewarded. I think a creative way to use a spell should be rewarded, but shouldn't void the need for an entire adventure arc. Spell abuses of all kinds should be restricted, and this category in particular needs some kind of restrictions. Daily reset is a horrible restriction for the above reasons.

If you want to massacre cows to turn into salt and sell it, you could just butcher the cows and sell the meat. Become a cowboy. The idea behind rituals was to pretty much replace the endless spell lists that wizards and other casters had letting them be your versatile spells. I run into far more problems being stonewalled by a DM than i do laughing while i exploit my rituals. "Your ritual fails he is protected by anti scrying wards" you get there its an orc warlord whose never used magic in his life. They require some DM cooperation, using explosive runes to take down a city wall might fly in some games but in most the DM will just say, they arent strong enough to take down the city walls. Or maybe it turns into an adventure all together to place them strategically a feat that can be easily replicated by an alchemist building lots and lots of actual bombs.

First, I was just listing some of the common exploits that I remembered off of the top of my head, not of rituals, but of 3.5's spells. The kind of spell that should have been a ritual, but wasn't, could be spammed, and led to caster imbalance. Those are some, but the problem is systemic: take divinations. As you mentioned, either you have horrible DM fiat or you end up with divinations voiding numerous possible plots, and a DM that needs to strongly consider what a caster can do before laying out his adventure. Which sucked, and was a good riddance IMO.

May 7, 2012 -- 2:24PM, draegn wrote:

My opinion is that there were far too many rituals in the game. A ritual, if everyone can do it, should be non-magical. Otherwise you turn every character and npc in the game into a half wizard. 

I feel the opposite way. You only need one person that can cast Rituals. Since Rituals don't use your combat resources, they become a group commodity. It doesn't matter anymore who casts these Rituals, the group just has them at their disposal. You still have magic at your disposal regardless of your party composition.

I think magic to solve out-of-combat is an essential part of D&D and that's why I think rituals should be magical and not mundane.

May 7, 2012 -- 2:31PM, Gnarl wrote:

May 7, 2012 -- 2:24PM, draegn wrote:

My opinion is that there were far too many rituals in the game. A ritual, if everyone can do it, should be non-magical. Otherwise you turn every character and npc in the game into a half wizard. 

I feel the opposite way. You only need one person that can cast Rituals. Since Rituals don't use your combat resources, they become a group commodity. It doesn't matter anymore who casts these Rituals, the group just has them at their disposal. You still have magic at your disposal regardless of your party composition.

I think magic to solve out-of-combat is an essential part of D&D and that's why I think rituals should be magical and not mundane.

Mixed feelings on both counts.

On the one hand, I don't want class to be the sole limiting factor in determining who can use magic and who can't.

On the other hand, I don't want magic to be the answer to out-of-combat problems once again.

I do want rituals, and I want it as a class-independant feature once more, but I'd also like for some mundane problems to be more difficult or impossible to solve with magic.

May 7, 2012 -- 2:35PM, lokiare wrote:

I think requiring the use of 2 action points to do any rituals would keep the cheese down to a minimum...

Cheese? What cheese?

May 7, 2012 -- 1:36PM, TheMormegil wrote:

May 7, 2012 -- 1:00PM, Ocule wrote:

You cant use a ritual like that unless your DM is horrible. No sane DM will allow the use of ritual exploitation to explode bombs.

I disagree strongly with the bolded. Imagine that you, as a DM, have laid out a siege scenario. Now a player comes up and says "well I use this spell in this way to break the castle walls so our army can swarm in". If you say no to that perfectly reasonable plan, even though it is an exploit of a flaw in the gaming system, you will encounter resentment by your players, especially if the siege scenario is tough. Why didn't it work? Spell A is Spell A after all...

This kind of thing is what I want the game system to esplicitly avoid. Some people like it; they say it is a creative way to use a spell and should be rewarded. I think a creative way to use a spell should be rewarded, but shouldn't void the need for an entire adventure arc. Spell abuses of all kinds should be restricted, and this category in particular needs some kind of restrictions. Daily reset is a horrible restriction for the above reasons.

If you want to massacre cows to turn into salt and sell it, you could just butcher the cows and sell the meat. Become a cowboy. The idea behind rituals was to pretty much replace the endless spell lists that wizards and other casters had letting them be your versatile spells. I run into far more problems being stonewalled by a DM than i do laughing while i exploit my rituals. "Your ritual fails he is protected by anti scrying wards" you get there its an orc warlord whose never used magic in his life. They require some DM cooperation, using explosive runes to take down a city wall might fly in some games but in most the DM will just say, they arent strong enough to take down the city walls. Or maybe it turns into an adventure all together to place them strategically a feat that can be easily replicated by an alchemist building lots and lots of actual bombs.

First, I was just listing some of the common exploits that I remembered off of the top of my head, not of rituals, but of 3.5's spells. The kind of spell that should have been a ritual, but wasn't, could be spammed, and led to caster imbalance. Those are some, but the problem is systemic: take divinations. As you mentioned, either you have horrible DM fiat or you end up with divinations voiding numerous possible plots, and a DM that needs to strongly consider what a caster can do before laying out his adventure. Which sucked, and was a good riddance IMO.

I think you missed my point on the first bit. There is nothing wrong with using explosive glyphs in a siege or something, i think what i was replying to was doing stuff that is beyond a rational scope of a players ability because of a flaw in warding. In 4e, blowing up an entire city with thousands of wards would be impractical to even attempt. Further i said using those rituals would be no different than using actual bombs, there is a restriction on how many times you can use it. The second part was DMs just not planning properly for player abilities ahead of time. It really takes fun off being a ritual caster and investing in that as an ability.

@ last two posts, keep in mind that not everyone is half wizard only those who invested in skill training for the propper skill and the ability to cast rituals so essentially they would half caster.